Future of Food

Have you seen this documentary? It is amazing, scary, eye opening, and motivating to do something about the future of our food.

The main premise is the fact that the future of our food is changing. Companies are now able to patent life. Genetically modify (GM) a seed and then own it. If it ends up in someone’s field who didn’t purchase it, they are liable. How did it get there? It doesn’t matter… they are still liable. They obtained something that didn’t belong to them without paying for it.

Small family farmers are in a great danger. They are being sued. They are being put out of business. They are being charged fines for having this seed. They are being harassed.

These seeds have never been tested or proven safe for the general public to consume. The most common GM crops are corn, soy, cotton and canola. The DNA of the GM seed is spliced with bacteria, antibiotics, and a gene from another organism that provides a desired trait (large, red, drought resistant, etc). Some of those genes are the pesticide itself so that it isn’t killed when the pesticide is sprayed. What is the world is this doing to our bodies? No one knows for sure.

These seeds being created are also resistant to pesticides… however.. there are now plants and weeds that are resistant to the pesticides and instead of spraying one chemical the crops are again needing more and more chemicals to survive.

These products that contain GM ingredients are not required to be labeled, so there is no traceability. If these ingredients could be traced and doctors could track people allergies or responses to these foods then these companies could be held liable. If people knew what these foods could do or are doing to our bodies, then most consumers would stop purchasing them. Since we have no idea what it does, where it is, or what we are eating, we continue and the harm grows.

There are also other great lessons from history that we are doomed to repeat. There have been blights or diseases that have killed large amounts of crops (potato crop in Ireland in 1740 and corn here in the US as recent as in the 1970s) because they were all the same strain. There are thousands of different types of corn or apples or carrots, and yet only a few varieties are grown and sold. If this continues, it could have drastic effects on feeding a nation if one disease kills that variety of fruit or vegetable.

This sounds all bad and depressing, but the last few minutes of the documentary talks about how the demand for organic food and local foods has increased greatly in the last two decades. Farmers markets have grown and there is an increasing demand. This is proof that people want to know what they are eating and they want to know it is safe to eat.

I highly recommend watching this. If you’ve already seen it, tell me what you thought! It can be viewed for free on Hulu. Enjoy!